In Forget Foucault, Baudrillard stands puzzled (and somewhat in awe) at the indelible incoherence in Foucault's genealogical theory. Foucault weaves a web of how power (or sexuality or discipline) has not dissipated in the liberal and democratic era, but suffused itself. In the pre-modern era, power stood centralized and cemented into a singular entity (the monarch's body, for example). The modern era did not erase this power, overcome happily in a people's revolution, but simply snaked into every avenue of life. The discursive reality of power was in the fact that everyone participated in it, thus becoming their own master. Such did not abolish the evil (Foucault would never dare such a word, but the moral judgement is baked into it), but only spread it (like improperly operating on cancer can spread it throughout the body). The result was that dominating power exists everywhere. No longer does a jailer need to threaten the captives, we've become our own jailers, internalizing it through the disciplinary mechanism of the panopticon. No longer are the outcasts supernaturally possessed (breeding fearful awe as much as disdain), but are simply infirm and insane. The discourse of madness rationalizes and masters reality, thus spreading the source of power throughout social systems. Modernity did not abolish royalty, but made every person a king. Sexuality has not liberate mankind, but made us even more obsessively scrupulous. There's never been repression except through the discourse of liberation, creating man's own prison through his ratiocination. So far Foucault.
But what is this power? Baudrillard notes how Foucault struggles to define it. But that's precisely the problem, isn't it? To define power is simply to create another rational linguistic game (especially when it service to critique). Thus, Foucault is truly Nietzschean in that he has substituted his own vision for the past's. While Foucault might distinguish power from its liminal extent (calling it 'resistance'), nothing seems to change or mean anything. Baudrillard compares this analysis (present equally in Deleuze) as a fully cracked windshield: it's clearly smashed into infinitely fractured pieces, yet the whole remains in tact. Why? How come the oppressed never seem interested in throwing off their chains? How come fascism has attracted people so easily? Everything moves and everything remains the same. How come?
The flurry of words, for Baudrillard, signify something else. It's not that power is everywhere, and now so clearly seen by the masses engaged in discourse about it (from academics like Foucault or mass-media to pop-culture, etc). Again, if everyone recognizes power and abjures it (in favor of the people's revolution), why does nothing seem to happen? Baudrillard considers infantile the mystification of capitalism and fascism to justify their continued hold on people's mind. He can't consider people so idiotic for this approach to make sense. Instead, it's because the secret of power is that it's a secret. And what's a secret? Nothing. To expose a secret is for it to cease to be a secret. It is the unknowable, which means it is the void. It simply does not exist. And all the best politicians have known this reality (which is precisely it's lack of reality). Power is not the same as physical force, but an unspeakable arrangement. Power exists when it is not talked about.
For Baudrillard, Focault's mystique is pulling the wool over people's eyes. Power never existed, and Foucault's theorizing appears as a self-negation (but, in fact, reinscribes a different kind of power order as much as Foucault's true significance remains hidden). As Baudrillard asks quizzically, if power didn't exist until it was discursively made available in various ideologies, where did it come from? It's a dead-end question. Power exists in its invisibility, not visibility. To make power visible is to offer it a challenge. Power cannot ever exist as a totality without risk of collapse. To refuse to meet a challenge is to concede. To be named is to be dared into over extension. And power, just like material accumulation, exists in a nervous apprehension that it dares to be immortal, yet is all too mortal. Thus, the discourse of power, while it claims to expose, really reinscribes a new kind of order. Hence, true power actually exists often among those who decry power. The ideology of victimhood that is all too prevalent in western politics is power precisely because none dare challenge it. And when it is challenged, it is not challenged extensively to over exert itself. Power claims to be unlimited, but can only exist as long as it stays within the folded shroud of its own limitations.
But, why do people challenge? Why does anyone bother if power's really an illusion? Because power seduces (the key concept in Baudrillard's essay). People want to play the game for the opportunity for reversal. The owned might one day become the owner. The dominated might become the dominator. Power depends upon this shared understanding, unleashing energetic movements back and forth as the game gets played. To call out "power" is equivalent to calling a time-out for a rule violation. Of course, all agree to this dynamic, where a challenge is issued and either won or lost. However, if the referee called every single play, if power was challenged again and again and again, what happens to the game? The game would dissolve because the game, fundamentally, is nothing. It's an arrangement that groups are "seduced" into, an internal leading which exists as a secret exists. To call up "the rules", as Foucault would have it, is production, producere, to lead out the nothing that is then exposed as such. There is no ontology besides subtle wordplay behind what Foucault is doing. One does not analyze power, sexuality, desire (per Deleuze), or anything else. These aren't phenomena, for as soon as they are they cease to be. They're corpses of the dead. To analyze power is to obsess over something that's already come and pass. Hence Baudrillard quotes Kafka:
"The Messiah will only come when he will no longer be necessary. He will come one day after his advent. He will not come on the day of the Last Judgement, but on the day after." (49)Thus, Foucault is himself something of a charlatan, but one who is playing the game. Foucaultian dynamics have become themselves the secret dynamic at work, manifest precisely in their faux-liberative attack on rationality, power, and the diffusive effects of categorical knowledge. This knowledge doesn't liberate, but simply is the game played once more, the same way revolutionaries find themselves quickly running a new bureaucracy. Thus, the enlightened is the one who understands the nature of the secret. However the superstitious, the overly zealous, not only end up ruining the game, but reviving it as a monstrosity:
"Power did not always consider itself power, and the secret of the great politicians was to know that power does not exist. To know that it is only a perspectival space of simulation, as was the pictorial Renaissance, and that if power seduces, it is precisely - what the naive realists of politics will never understand - because it is simulacrum and because it undergoes a metamorphosis into signs and invented on the basis of signs. (This is why parody, the reversal of signs or their hyperextension, can touch power more deeply than any force relation.) This secret of power's lack of existence that the great politicians shared also belongs to the great bankers, who know that money is nothing, that money does not exist; and it also belonged to the great theologians and inquisitors who knew that God does not exist, that God is dead. This gives them incredible superiority. Power is truly sovereign when it grasps this secret and confronts itself with that very challenge. When it ceases to do so and pretends to finds a truth, a substance, or a representation (in the will of the people, etc.), then it loses its sovereignty, allowing others to hurl back the challenge of its own life or death, until it dies in effect at the hands of that infatuation with itself, that imaginary concept of itself, and that superstitious belief in itself as a substance; it dies as well when it fails to recognize itself as a void, or as something reversible in death. At one times leaders were killed when they lost that secret" (59)
Thus, to confuse power for what it is is to invite its dissolution. To think it's something, which can be grasped, handled, hoarded, or wielded is to kill the very thing beloved. Per Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, it's Lenny's love of pretty things that causes him to murder. Vivisection rapidly leads to death. To break things down into smaller and smaller components is to essentially erase them (as an atomic view of "reality" is basically to treat empirical phenomena as the simulacra and lose one's self in a delusion). Thus, not only does Foucault construct a new myth, but it's grasping after a static void. The nothingness of the secret (in all its fecundity) is reduced to a corpse, a reified shell. Thus, not only do Foucaultians play the game, but they turn it into an absurdity. It's not life, but a zombie. Power is resurrected as resistance, but since the power described is dead, its return to life is as a zombie. Thus, alongside Kafka, Baudrillard cites a piece of graffiti from Los Angeles: "When Jesus arose from the dead, he became a Zombi". Which is to say, the liberative potential is really nothing more than a reanimated corpse. The luster of life, seduction, is replaced with a pale (and consciously sculpted) imitation.
This self-creation is itself what constitutes the allure of "fascism". It wasn't some romantic mystique of the past or the leader. Rather, it was an aesthetic rendition of what was lost. There was no politics, since power had died a death of a thousand cuts in the banality of Weimar. It was self-consciously playing a game, like resurrecting a sport and playing it as an "old" game. It was nostalgia, a dance with the dead as if they were still alive. It was a fundamentally parasitic order, not creating something new but trying to stuff life (a dead and meaningless reification) back into a corpse. Thus, fundamentally, the antifascist Foucaultian turn among many European leftists was of the same ethos as fascism. The same form appears again and again and again. Death is overcome through zombification, an infinite fractalization of this named (and killed) power. And rather than the artful dance of seduction, this produces a frenzied reproduction, a factory on overdrive, to produce more and more and more and more and more cases. Thus fascism and antifascism are the same aestheticization of politics, the zombification of power, creating a nightmare for a world as it falls apart but shambles on. Death is abolished, even as it is reinscribed.
Thus, to ask Baudriallard what the way out is would be to miss the point. There's no way out because one would then think there's some world outside of the one we live in. Rather, seduction leads us to fall in love with our illusions, which can exist so long as we uncritically believe them to exist. Overexerting any system by challenge will begin to topple it. And it's precisely the desire to play the game, for real, which will then send any regime or order into a kind of collapse. It's grasping after the wind. To grab it is for it to cease to be wind. And in the hyperreal world of the simulacra is to try to transform the void into zombies, rather than allowing the course of death to take its toll. Those enlightened, to know it's all nothing, become free inside (knowing it's all a game) even as they, to advance, must act as if it's all very real. But the fuzziness of the borders, ambiguities in the rules, word-play in doctrine are not to be solved, but enjoyed just as they are.
Baudrillard's vision is a powerful reversal to the Foucaultian genealogy. To speak of freedom is to require repression. The romantic revolutionary can't exist without the enemy. Thus fascism's romantic streak is precisely that it can't win without losing. It must continue in rebellion, even as it rules the entire world. But unlike the classic revolutionary, that frantically seeks the real (the same way the autist in The Rainmaker seeks an answer to the joke who's one first), the fascist aestheticization is to self-consciously play the game as game to achieve its own will worship. Again, it's what links Foucaultean leftists to the Nazis, an anti-politics of self-expression, politics as an ethos. It's perhaps why Carl Schmitt referred to Hitler originally as a "Disraelite". A double-insult, Schmitt considers Hitler's histrionics as the same romantic politics of Disraeli: politics was an art of self-expression. This meant rhetoric is the only real, a reveling in its own emptiness as an expression of straightforward power politics. In short, Hitler would've been a YIPpee (a point that Armand Barotti makes in his essay "Fascist Ideology of the Self").
Baudrillard offers a serious challenge to any claim of a real. He has a point, especially in theological terms, that the victory of God as an immanent creator presaged God's death. As God was made available either as the distant engineer (who was accessible and understand through human reasoning and nature) or as a close friend/force (grasped through feeling or willing) God ceased to exist. Baudrillard isn't saying that there isn't a "real" world, but we only live as human being (through artifice) by constricting this real world. The real world is inorganic and dead. And while perhaps all things pertaining to mankind must eventually quit their game, it's the real which is to be kept at bay.
However, this view of "the real" ultimately denies the reality of the human consciousness, depending upon the dynamic of modern science. In contrast, perhaps the real is none other than the appearances themselves. To discover the atomic is not to fabricate a new world, but to discover worlds layered in worlds (though perhaps not all worlds are fit for human life). Rather than seeing the real as death, the real is life. It is the energetic excess of life which defines the world, not the cold and lifeless death. For Baudrillard would then have to deal with the very coming to be of life, especially human life. The view of science as a saving of the appearances would then not simply to defend humanity's island in the sky, but to actually fully channel what the world actually is intended to be. Thus Berkeley's neoplatonic Logos metaphysics actually undergirds a view of things in contradistinction. While various orders and rules may phase in and out of being, they're very coming to being depends upon a real order outside of them that impinges upon how the rules are played. The obsessive quest of the revolutionary to ratiocinate himself into the divine councils of the Real are false not because there's no real (and he mistakes what the game is). Rather he fails to adequately deal with history as such. The reinscribing of a new order is not simply an expression of keeping the secret while writing new rules. The very fact of rules depends upon the existence (even if not understood) of a cosmic order. And that cosmic order does not stand apart from human life (which requires it to be stolen from Heaven by some brave Jacobin Prometheus on behalf of the people). But it is through human life viz. history.
Thus, the theology of resurrection is strictly opposed to the zombification of aesthetic politics. The resurrection of Jesus is the glorification of flesh into a new order of being, an eternal order, one that has no beginning or end. It is not simply life returned, like putting toothpaste back in the tube (resulting in a grotesque mess with very little success). Yet this order requires its own secret. The freedom of a new order depends upon it not being enslaved to the past. Jesus fulfills Israel's history, but only indirectly. He is the messiah, but only in the third person. The disciples see Jesus risen, but His appearance defies categorization. It's a whisper in the wind, not a self-derived memento mori, but God as spirit and light. The future is opened to a new order of things. The past is not erased, but fulfilled. And political orders throughout time, as much as they're alive or vibrant, reflect a similar historical suffusion (neither given to utopia nor nostalgia).
Baudrillard successfully exposes the emptiness of the Foucaultian project, but then leaves his own project in suspension. The christ can never actually come, or at least he always comes too late. But what if the Messiah crosses the threshold. The secret does not paper over a gaping abyss, but acts as sunglasses. The Real is not death, but our lives are dead compared to the life of the Real. Could we bear such a weight of glory as we are? No, but thanks be to God He raises the dead.
No comments:
Post a Comment